Drugs and the Brain

Oxycodone is the active ingredient in a number of prescription opioid painkillers, including Oxycotin and Percocet, which are used to treat moderate-to-severe pain. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, it is one of the most common opioids (along with methadone and hydrocodone) associated with overdose death. Every day, over 1000 people go…

Methamphetamine is a toxic drug that destroys your body and ruins your appearance. Meth users often have pot-marked faces due to acne or picking scars. Meth use leads to decaying of the teeth and poor dental health. But what is most notable is that the bodies of meth users appear to quickly deteriorate, a condition…

It can be easy to get into the habit of pushing aside concerns and replacing problem-solving behaviors with substance use or other non-constructive methods of coping. We all get used to behaving in certain ways in response to stress; in fact, after reacting to a situation the same way a few times, our brains program…

What Is Mindfulness? Mindfulness is the psychological process of paying close attention to and accepting experiences in the present moment with compassion, without judgment, and without acknowledgment of the past or future. It is thought that focusing on the present allows for individuals to increase their perception of self, which allows them to develop strategies…

To gain control over addiction, it is important to remove all drugs from your system that affect neurological signaling, which includes caffeine. Although caffeine is commonplace and not considered to be harmful in most cases, it is an addictive substance that can cause its own set of health problems such as upset stomach, sleep disorders,…

The children’s rhyme makes it seem so simple: first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes the baby in a baby carriage. Of course this perfect image isn’t always a reality. The hope and expectation is a happy, healthy, bouncing little baby in your arms, but what happens when something, God forbid, goes wrong? Alcohol…

Neurostimulation is being investigated as a tool used to treat many neurological disorders, like depression, Alzheimer disease, Parkinson disease, bipolar disorder, schizophrenia, and addiction. For most of these conditions, neurostimulation is considered an investigational treatment not yet proved as a viable therapy or covered by health insurance.   Approved Neurostimulation Therapies There is substantial evidence…

Only 6% of the 1 billion individuals who try to quit smoking are successful for longer than one month. For this reason, it can be argued that the current tobacco secession tools are inadequate and that there is a need to develop better products/methods to facilitate secession. One of the challenges with quitting any drug…

What is opioid-induced hyperalgesia? Opioid-induced hyperalgesia is the occurrence of increased pain sensitivity in response to opioid administration. In other words, taking opioids in excess and/or for a long period of time has been known to lower the individual’s pain threshold so pain seems worse even if the opioid dose is increased. This phenomenon is…

Robert L. DuPont, Jr, MD, made the term “gateway drug” famous in his book Getting Tough on Gateway Drugs: a Guide for the Family. DuPont observed that youths at his clinic often engaged in alcohol and tobacco use before proceeding on to marijuana use. He thought that psychological barriers prevented the use of hard drugs…